Industrial systems, such as turbine engines, air conditioners, and power generators, are becoming more complex, often including a large number of mechanical and electrical subsystems and components. These systems often include on-board monitoring and diagnosis mechanisms configured to monitor the performance and operational status of the subsystems and components. For complex industrial systems, the performance of the monitoring and diagnosis mechanisms may be compromised due to failure of their components, such as sensors, transmission lines, and software components.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,764,188 B2 discloses a system for maintaining machine operation comprising a monitoring device and an electronic control module coupled to a machine. The electronic control module is configured to identify a data collection error associated with the monitoring device. In response to the data collection error, the system then collects a replacement parameter that is interchangeable with the erroneous parameter and downloads the replacement parameter via a wireless communication channel.
Conventional monitoring and alarm systems, however, do not provide mechanisms to analyze and evaluate data collected over a long period of time in order to discover performance issues. Conventional monitoring and alarm systems also fail to monitor data quality of the data generated by various subsystems and components or to provide a warning when the data quality deteriorates. In addition, the performance data collected by conventional monitoring and alarm systems often reflect operation of the industrial system over a very limited period of time and is, thus, not reliable for the system manufacturers or operators to monitor the performance of the system.